Slashdot Mirror
Teraflop In A Box At SC2003
HPC Prophet writes "For those of you that can't go to SC2003 or can't afford the US$750 late registration, here is a small taste of what we put together for our friends at Mellanox Technologies...It benches out at over 1.2TFLOP (192 dual Intel Xeon Processor blades, 64 in a Rackable chassis, 128 crammed into a Ciara chassis and all connected via InfiniBand) and loaded up with Callident Rx (based on NPACI Rocks) OS/Middleware. Total estimated time to unpack, build and get up and running was 17 hours." Read on for some details on this power-hog.
"We had the single-most power density for the smallest size booth they offer (380amps @ 208v in a 5U of rack space (look closely at the bottom of the middle rack containing all the cables and InfiniBand switches). Cooling was very nice too, we maxed out our Liebert HVAC when building it initially. Oh, by the way, this would end up somewhere in the neighborhood of #38 on the June 2003 Top500 list. There are a couple of other pictures on there too of some of the other attractions at SC2003 like the 128-node cluster that NPACI folks will build in a 2 hour period. Sorry about the cheezy slide show, I had to be quick."
I like that they actually put this demo together with Windows XP Power Toys.
"For those of you that can't go to SC2003 or can't afford the US$750 late registration"
What about those of us that don't have a clue what sc2003 is?
In case anybody wants it, the link to the conference is at
http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/
Several of the lectures are being broadcast via high bandwidth video if
you are on Internet2.
A box full of Pentium Xeons in a cluster. So what? This stuff is getting rather passe. Where is the invention and innovation?
a computer that will be able to run Windows Longhorn!
If you look at the more recent November 2003 list instead of the older June 2003 one, this cluster would rate more like #84 than #38.
/cj
Funny you say that ... MS does daily automated builds of Windows for all it's supported CPU platforms and does installs to a large farm of workstations. For Win2k, the build cluster was comprised of Compaq 8x processor Xeon servers. I imagine they may have moved to larger hardware like a Unisys E7000 by now. Windows is well over 20 million LOC now, and doing a daily build takes over 10 hours.
meh.
I only wish the price of these things would slide down a little more.
Cost of this 1 teraflop Mellanox machine is less than US$1e6 according to this brochure.
That's considerably less than the US$50e6 that the first teraflop machine cost (Sandia's ASCI Red see this SC1996 flier) 7 years ago.
I don't have a spare million, either, but that kind of 98% price reduction is still fairly impressive.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Meanwhile, IBM recently built the prototype for a single BlueGene/L node, and it manages to cram 1024 PPC440 processors, with a Rpeak of 2Teraflops, and an Rmax of over 1.4TF into about half the space of the full racks mentioned in this article.
While this article is obviously about a somewhat less custom system than BlueGene/L, I'd have to say I'm much more impressed with IBM's achievement.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge